A Matheuristic for the Design and Management of Multi-energy Systems

New technologies and emerging challenges are drastically changing how the energy needs of our society have to be met. By consequence, energy models have to adapt by taking into account such new aspects while aiding in decision making processes of the design of energy systems. In this work the problem of the design and operation of a multi-energy system is tackled by means of a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation. Given the large size of the problem to be solved, a matheuristic approach based on constraint relaxations and variable fixing is proposed in order to not restrict the applicability to small cases. Two variable fixing policies are presented and performance analysis comparison on them has been done. Tests have been performed on small and realistic instances and results show the correctness of the approach and the quality of the heuristic proposed in term of solution quality and computational time.